For David Villa, Change Might Be a Good Thing

Image

David Villa scored against Tahiti in a Confederations Cup match in Brazil last month. Villa is Spain’s all-time leading scorer and the only player with 50 goals for his national team.CreditCreditPilar Olivares/Reuters

The essence of a team sport is that it allows — demands even — that a player grow and adapt with the passing of time.

On Monday morning, Andy Murray said that nothing in his life could ever be more special than winning Wimbledon for the first time. At 26, he has probably peaked, mentally, physically and materially.

That same Monday morning, David Villa was sold by Barcelona to Atlético Madrid for little more than a tenth of the €40 million that Barça had paid for him three years ago. At 31, Villa has every incentive in his life to change his role, to become a different type of forward, to explore new ground, so to speak.

That is where the team player, if he is smart, can challenge himself in a way that gets better with age. “The body slows down, but the brain speeds up,” was the way that Anthony Dowell, the dancer who became artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London, once put it.

For Murray, just as it was for Maria Sharapova when she won Wimbledon at only 17, the pinnacle demands the intensity of nearly gladiatorial proportions. But for Villa, the role conversion might yield three years, or more, of new rewards.

On the face of, Villa is as singular as it gets in soccer.

He has won the World Cup, won the Golden Boot as top scorer in a European Championship, and won every medal at the club and national team level that a career can offer. His 282 goals in 575 games played for Sporting Gijón, Zaragoza, Valencia and Barcelona, are surpassed by his record of 56 goals in 91 matches for his country thus far.

Villa, alone among Spaniards, has topped 50 goals for his national side. Yet as Spain regroups after its heavy defeat to Brazil in the Confederations Cup last month, it is perfectly clear that the coach, Vicente Del Bosque, will be re-examining the so-called “false No. 9” formation that made his team so successful without an apparent out-and-out striker.

Del Bosque now has less than a year before Spain must defend its World Cup, again in Brazil. When the coach goes back to his drawing board, he will obviously take form into account — and no doubt if Fernando Torres and David Villa, genuine pals as well as compatible forwards, have recaptured anything like their best work, then it will surely be Torres at No. 9 and Villa floating around him, often from the left, at No. 7.

And Del Bosque believes in Villa. He once said, before the 2010 World Cup, that he would rather have David Villa than Kaká or Cristiano Ronaldo, the two outstanding players at Del Bosque’s former club, Real Madrid.

The coach spoke of Villa’s courage, his decision making, his mobility and his rare combination of choosing the moment when to take the shot or when to be selfless and play in others.

So why the move from Barcelona to Madrid? A combination of factors. Villa needed time to adapt his play, to get on the same wavelength as those unique passers and movers Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández at Barça. His record there — 48 goals in 116 games — isn’t bad, but it was interrupted by the second lengthy injury of his career.

In childhood, the boy from the mining village of Langreo in the north of Spain had shattered his femur. While others doubted he would recover from that, Villa’s father encouraged the youngster to work on developing the other foot to master the ball, just in case.

The result is a two-footed striker. Then, playing for Barcelona at the Club World Cup in Yokohama, Japan, in December 2011, his tibia snapped. Once more it was a complicated fracture that cost Villa the rest of the season, along with Euro 2012.

And as happens in sports, the team cannot wait for the individual. Pedro grew into Barça’s attack during Villa’s absence, and now there is the arrival of a superstar, Neymar, to link up (Barcelona hopes) with Messi.

Hence the cut-rate sale. Villa made his choice this week between moving to a fresh challenge with the London team Tottenham Hotspur, or moving within a league he knows, to Madrid.

He joins a team that has a spectacular affinity with fine strikers, though not a budget to hold them for very long. Diego Forlán, Sergio Agüero, and more recently Radamel Falcao have had phenomenal seasons in Atletico’s red and white stripes, then moved on, which both profited the players and allowed the Madrid club to pay off some of its debts.

Villa arrives there as an opportune time. Atlético holds the King’s Cup and, as the third-place team in La Liga last season, plays in the Champions League. Villa has big shoes to fill in place of Falcao, who has taken the option of moving to the tax haven of Monaco.

I can see Villa taking this chance all the way to the World Cup next summer. He is experienced, and Atlético has an experienced lineup to complement him. The team looks for a man to try to replace Falcao’s instinctive striking quality, but whereas the Colombian Falcao often appeared almost out of the shadows to steal goals, Villa has always worked indefatigably for what came his way.

This, though, is Villa’s time to challenge himself. He might be 31 going on 26 because the year that his broken limb in Yokohama cost him — and the place in Barcelona’s team — might well have meant less wear and tear and less energy expended during his recuperation.

Everything he has ever achieved has been fired by desire. In his youth, he idolized Luís Enrique and Quini, who came from the same region, Asturias, as he did.

Over time, his reputation outgrew theirs. The Spanish still call Villa by his Asturian nickname, El Guaje. Today, as a senior player still looking to enhance a record that no Spaniard could match, the last thing you would call him is the Kid.